“It was like a commitment we made to our community that we were going to improve the quality of the food that was on our kids’ trays," Wiggins said about changing the school lunches offered in DPS.

U.S. Department of Agriculture
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Stateside’s conversation with Betti Wiggins, former head of the Office of School Nutrition for Detroit Public Schools and current Officer of Nutrition Services for the Houston Independent School District.

Is ketchup a vegetable? How about the tomato paste in pizza sauce?

For decades, what we feed our children for lunch when they're at school has been as much about politics as it has been about health.

Former first lady Michelle Obama made healthier school lunches a priority. The Trump Administration has since scaled back the stricter nutritional requirements that Obama pushed for, specifically standards in three areas: whole grains, salt, and milk.

Today on Stateside​, we decided to see how all this plays out where it matters most – school cafeterias.

Betti Wiggins, Officer of Nutrition Services for the Houston Independent School District, is one of the best in the country at figuring out how to serve the healthiest food possible to school kids.

She headed the Office of School Nutrition for Detroit Public Schools, and she's credited with transforming the food served to Detroit kids. She was also honored by Eating Well Magazine this year as a Top 10 American Food Hero, and many people know her as the “Rebel Lunch Lady.”

When Wiggins started at DPS, she says school lunches looked “beige." That's before she started making changes.

“Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam, we chased them out of town,” Wiggins said. “We had a funeral for the deep fat fryers. We took what I call ‘countable food’ — hot dogs and corn dogs — off the menu. We removed the little square pizzas. We removed iceberg lettuce and came up with a salad mix that was specifically designed for Detroit. We started buying local food.”

Wiggins said that they also added more fruit and vegetable options and made sure to be inclusive with options, offering Meatless Monday selections.

While the expenses for food went up, Wiggins saw it as not only worth it, but manageable.

“If we think about serving kids as an extension of the classroom, if we think about supporting academic achievement by making sure that kids have a nutrient-dense, high-caloric diet that supports brain activity and all the other phyilogical things that go on that’s driven by food, then it’s a slam dunk. It’s easy,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins sees making a switch to more health-conscious and “good food” as an option for other school districts too, saying that, “Healthy is relative.”

“If you get a higher quality food and prepare it in the correct way, it is healthy,” she said. “We had to change that, that healthy food is only food that you buy at Whole Foods. You can have healthy food from anywhere.”

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The number of Michigan K-12 students eligible for free and reduced lunches decreased for the third year in a row in 2016.

According to the latest data from the Michigan Center for Educational Performance and Information, which heads up the state’s student counts, over 700,000 students qualified for subsidized lunches in the 2016/17 school year. That’s 45.6% of Michigan students.

The United States was once considered an agricultural nation, but these days, most people are two or three generations away from the farm. Fewer than two percent of Americans live on farms, and many don’t understand where their food comes from, how it’s grown, or how it’s processed.

A new effort at Michigan State University is trying to change that. The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources is leading an initiative called Food @ MSU.